The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Posted Jun 3, 2008 18:53 UTC (Tue) by danielpf (guest, #4723)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Mandriva 2008.1 should not be overlooked. On my last laptop I tried Fedora 9, Ubuntu 8.04 and
Mandriva 2008.1, and finally kept Mandriva as overall the most convincing of the three
distros.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Posted Jun 3, 2008 21:02 UTC (Tue) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]

Seconded. It will be very cool to see the same test with Mandriva 2008.1.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Posted Jun 3, 2008 21:20 UTC (Tue) by briangmaddox (guest, #39279) [Link]

Same here.  I have a Dell Inspiron E1705 and Mandriva 2008.1 had everything working out of the
box.  In fact, it was the first distro I've had where everything just worked and I didn't have
to go about building my own kernel.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Posted Jun 4, 2008 6:49 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I too was surprised and disappointed Mandriva was not tested. After all it is a distro that positions itself for desktop use by normal people, and the last versions IMHO succeed better there than any other I have tried. I haven't installed the latest version on a laptop, but 2008.0 worked on an IBM thinkpad T23 with only minor glitches: no sound after suspend/resume, and the default X display depth of 24 bits did not work with video players, but going down to 16 bits solved it, and 16 bits is better anyway for such an older, slower machine. T23 does not have built-in wlan, so cannot comment on that. A cheap Bluetooth USB dongle was recognized by the system and usable with KDE's Bluetooth tools. I also got a Huawei 3G dongle working, but this required a "mode switch" program (from http://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/) to be installed, so goes a bit beyond what can be achieved with mouse-based configuration tools.

The Grumpy Editor's Guide to distributions for laptops

Posted Jun 5, 2008 7:58 UTC (Thu) by rghetta (subscriber, #39444) [Link] (1 responses)

I'm also is a bit disappointed too see a review including OpenSolaris and a beta release, but
not the released Mandriva 2008.1

Mandrosoft

Posted Jun 12, 2008 9:05 UTC (Thu) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

I'm afraid it might just leave some bad taste in mouth just as Novell's inventions: folks have
clearly shifted from community-friendly approach into commercialized one.

Wouldn't recommend it to anyone after they've fired Gael, frankly.